What to Do When Your Windows 10 Laptop Keeps Waking Up from Sleep Mode

Jan 10, 2017

If you own a Windows 10 laptop, have you ever experienced this annoying problem where the laptop keeps waking itself up inside your laptop bag, draining your battery like crazy for nothing while warming the bag up in the meantime?

While it’s still a mystery to me why doing so, here is a quick, simple solution to work around the situation. You can change the behavior of the system to tell the computer to hibernate instead of sleep when you close the lid. When you put a computer in hibernation mode, you are saving the current system’s state to a hibernate file, aka hiberfil.sys. Because a hibernating computer won’t wake up until you tell it to, it keeps the battery fully charged during the travel.

How to change laptop lid closing behavior in Windows 10

Click Start, type “Power Option” and click Power Option in the search result list.

The Power Options dialog box opens up. Click “Choose what closing the lid does” from a list of links listed on the left.

Change the behavior for When I close the lid to Hibernate for both On battery and Plugged in and click Save Changes button.

The options may look different depending on the brand and model of laptop you are using but pretty much every modern laptop capable of running Windows 10 should have the similar option to define the behavior for when the lid is closing down.

That’s all you need to do. From now on, when you close the lid of your laptop you are guaranteed to have a fully charged battery when you open it up next time.

The only drawback, it takes longer to wake up from hibernation mode than sleeping mode but the difference will be trivial on an SSD-equipped laptop.